An Experiment in DS106 Radio…

This week was all about our radio show, and boy was it an adventure! Let’s get right into it.

On Wednesday, our group (me, Ien, Carmela, and Jeremy) got together briefly and set our radio plan in motion. The timing was a bit rough. We had met last week, but with Fall break being at the beginning of the week, we missed out on a few days to get together. At our Wednesday meeting, we decided on our title and topic (The Science Behind The Wire). This topic was suggested a few weeks ago by Ien, and being a physics major myself, naturally I jumped at the idea. Once we had agreed on our topic, we discussed how we wanted our show to go down. We wanted to discuss several aspects of surveillance, so we decided to break our show into 4 main parts: Pager cloning, wiretaps, legal components of wiretaps, and GPS tracking. Ien and I wanted to do some of the actual commentary of the science parts. We all decided that it would be neat if Carmela would bring up a surveillance topic and how it was used in the show, and then Ien and I would discuss the actual science. Jeremy wanted to be in charge of the wiretapping legal issues, and we were more than happy to let him do it!

On Thursday morning, we met with Professors Groom and Bond via Google Hangout to discuss our project. This was a short 20 minute meeting where we hashed out the last few details, and Profs. Groom and Bond had some great advice for us as far as transitions and how to make it seem more like an actual radio show.

So with everything all set and planned out, we decided to record on Friday. We completed the recording in just about 2 hours total. Ien and I met with Carmela in the morning in an empty physics lab in Jepson (a fairly appropriate setting, if I do say so myself) to record the bulk of the audio. We spent maybe about 30 minutes going over final plans, and then maybe an hour recording her intro parts leading into our discussions. Later in the day, we met in the same room with Jeremy to record his segment about legal issues. This take was super simple, and took no more than 30 minutes total to record.

Ien did the compiling and final audio touches. All in all, it was a great experience! It actually got me to thinking about maybe doing something like this again. Who knows…

Anyway, we hope you like the show. Maybe you’ll learn something, maybe not, but either way, we had a blast making it. Let us know what you think! Also, you could share it too if you wish with these nifty share buttons below!